FortiSwitch Brochure

FortiSwitch-5003A and 5003 Fabric and Base Backplane Communications Guide

36 01-30000-85717-20081205

Fabric channel layer-2 link aggregation and redundancy FortiGate-5140 fabric backplane communication

You must also enable the FortiSwitch-5003A board to listen for heartbeat packets

on all of the interfaces connected to FortiGate-5001A boards:

config switch fabric-channel physical-port

edit "slot-6"

set heartbeat enable

edit "slot-8"

set heartbeat enable

edit "slot-9"

set heartbeat enable

edit "slot-10"

set heartbeat enable

edit "slot-11"

set heartbeat enable

edit "slot-13"

set heartbeat enable

end

Fabric channel layer-2 link aggregation and redundancy

In addition to 802.3adstatic mode layer-2 link aggregation and 802.1q VLANs the

FortiSwitch-5003A board also supports 802.1s Multi-Spanning Tree Protocol

(MSTP) for the fabric channels. You can use MSTP to add redundancy to a link

aggregation configuration. Redundancy consists of redundant FortiSwitch-5003A

boards that both distribute traffic to multiple FortiGate-5001A or 5005FA2 boards.

To be able to use redundant FortiSwitch-5003A boards in one chassis you must

configure MSTP to eliminate loops. You can also use MSTP settings to control

traffic flow and create different kinds of redundant configurations:

• An active-passive configuration where the active FortiSwitch-5003A board

receives all traffic and distributes it to the FortiGate-5001A or 5005FA2 boards.

If the active FortiSwitch-5003A board fails, all traffic is diverted to the passive

FortiSwitch-5003A board which takes over distributing traffic to the

FortiGate-5001A or 5005FA2 boards.

• An active-active configuration where both FortiSwitch-5003A boards receive

and distribute traffic. If one of the FortiSwitch-5003A boards fails, all traffic is

diverted to the remaining FortiSwitch-5003A board which takes over

distributing all traffic to the FortiGate-5001A or 5005FA2 boards.

Redundant configurations require a third-party switch that supports MSTP and is

used to connect the FortiSwitch-5003A boards to the networks. You configure

MSTP on the third-party switch and on the FortiSwitch-5003A boards to create

spanning tree instances on all three devices. All three devices must have the

same spanning tree instances. Depending on the requirement, the spanning tree

instances can have different priorities on each device. You can also use the

third-party switch to add and remove VLAN tags from incoming and outgoing

traffic.